Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Two great belief systems are clashing here. The older liberals tend to be individualistic and meritocratic. A citizen’s job is to be activist, compassionate and egalitarian. Boomers generally think they earned their success through effort and talent. The younger militants tend to have been influenced by the cultural Marxism that is now the lingua franca in the elite academy. Group identity is what matters. Society is a clash of oppressed and oppressor groups. People who are successful usually got that way through some form of group privilege and a legacy of oppression....

The generation gap on the right is less dramatic. It’s less politically important because the young don’t influence the G.O.P. much; the old Trumpians do.

But over the long run it will matter. The boomer conservatives, raised in the era of Reagan, generally believe in universal systems — universal capitalism, universal democracy and the open movement of people and goods. Younger educated conservatives are more likely to see the dream of universal democracy as hopelessly naïve, and the system of global capitalism as a betrayal of the working class. Younger conservatives are comfortable in a demographically diverse society, but are also more likely to think in cultural terms, and to see cultural boundaries.

Whether on left or right, younger people have emerged in an era of lower social trust, less faith in institutions, a greater awareness of group identity. They live with the reality of tribal political warfare and are more formed by that warfare.

This is precisely why the Alt-Right is inevitable, and probably not the more moderate varieties either. Both white American liberalism and white American conservatism are dying, because both ideological perspectives are fundamentally dependent upon the homogeneous majority white population that existed pre-1965. Note that neither the liberal nor the conservative ideology have ever taken root anywhere outside the United States despite the USA's global cultural influence. That's why they will not survive post-American US politics; neither holds any appeal to Diversity.

The big difference between Generation Z and its predecessors is that their knowledge of identity politics is real and formative, whereas that of the older generations is mostly symbolic and theoretical. The Boomers, Generation Xers, and Millennials love to feel that they are helping poor unfortunate minorities through their virtue-signaling, whereas Generation Z looks around and realizes that they are in the minority themselves and they are surrounded by a Diversity that hates, envies, and fears them.

The older generations of whites simply cannot conceive of the white population not being completely in charge. The youngest generation realizes how heavily the deck is stacked against them.

Brooks used "cultural Marxism", I'll be damned, and now the Fredocons at National Review have permission to use it as well. Confession of being a coward in not looking at the 207 NYTs approved comments, which no doubt will be in the effeminate voices of nothing to worry about and we really hate you, consistency not being a feminine virtue.

FWIW, the 18-29 demographic broke for the Democrats in the midterms by a gigantic margin -- Dems got 68% of that vote. That was, by far, the largest gap for that age group since the data went back (1982) and much larger than 2016. The swing from 2016 to 2018 was probably less about changing attitudes and more about turnout differences. (Same with the Hispanic and black vote, which shifted more to the Dem side in 2018 than 2016, despite Trump yammering about the record unemployment numbers.)

In the midterms, the only age bracket that broke for Republicans was the boomers. Fortunately the boomers are a large cohort. Unbearable though they be, at least they reliably vote Republican.

The first wave of non-whites, who came to Canada, from British colonies are alarmed that whites will not be in charge. They are boomer age or slightly younger, but witnessed the end of white rule in their countries and fled their own kind, to be parasitic off white culture. Their children are more in conflict with whites, not as tolerant of white culture, thinking themselves non-parasitic like Xit does.

Maybe these young non-whites are not as wary of the subsequent waves of non-white nations coming into post-western Canada because they did not witness the troubles of independence when the western colonization ended. It is like how socialism is giving itself credit for civic nation building success when really we are in slow decline and it doesn't know it. I was alarmed since forty years ago. This is very slow.

Cloom wrote:The first wave of non-whites, who came to Canada, from British colonies are alarmed that whites will not be in charge. They are boomer age or slightly younger, but witnessed the end of white rule in their countries and fled their own kind, to be parasitic off white culture. Their children are more in conflict with whites, not as tolerant of white culture, thinking themselves non-parasitic like Xit does.

Reminiscent of current older Africans who remember colonial life wishing colonialism would come back after tasting the inevitable politics of tribalism and rampant corruption their "freedom" brought them.

The Boomers remain deluded into believing the Constitution matters to anyone. The Gen-Xers always get excused, but all that I’ve met are the most deeply entrenched liberals of the generations (they were the brainwashed teachers and professors of us Millennials mind you). And they’re generally so self-absorbed that they are blind to the macrocosmic problems. Millennials are often seen as the worst, most delusional, most incapable, most liberal group. This is false. We are about 3/4 brain dead NPCs, and a remaining quarter of us are the most capable and truth-seeking of all analogous generations. That hardcore quarter are the people that Gen-Z learned from. They didn’t have any real contact with Boomers or Gen-Xers. The massive demographic change happened to us, during our time in public education and beyond, not any prior generations. The Gen-Zers don’t look to any Boomers or Xers, they look at them Millenial martyrs that underwent the height of globalist conditioning and demographic change and still fought it. Look at any internet censorship situation and you will see Millenials creating or posting content that a Gen-Xer will inevitably censor or take down (all the social media and tech elites are Gen-X).

OT I suppose.Latest Q posting, #2502. Asked the question of what happens if the House fails prior to majority change? The headline banner was Border Security = National Security. What if Trump is planning to release the indictments prior to Jan 20? And, the declass so long promised? I suppose, as President, he could reschedule his tribunal EO. Read the full drop at link.

The alt-right is inevitable because things are forcing people to search.

Socialists think wealth arises spontaneously and that their ideas to manipulate society will work because there won't be incentives.

Libertarians have figured out that you need freedom and justice - free markets, property rights, contract law - to create wealth as well as entrepreneurs, but somehow think liberty arises spontaneously and doesn't require any special culture, or fighting for or maintenance.

The Constitution said "To secure the blessings of Liberty for ourselves and our posterity" - they realized you needed something upstream to produce liberty which produced peace and prosperity.

That is where you find the alt-lite, and the alt-right that noticed liberty comes only from a narrow set of cultures. I've noticed southern Europe produced the PIIGs irresponsibility compared to northern European thrift and industry.

Right now the argument is about which and how much of the cultural elements (like Christendom, Graeco-Roman law and philosophy, English common law, genetics) are required. And if there is yet one more upstream step, which I think would be Christian revival and a third Great Awakening.

These kind of people look for answers. And eventually accept even unpleasant truths. That is why the alt-right is inevitable.

I grew up in a Texas city that has always been Mexican majority. I learned pretty early that non-whites hate whites and diversity is not our strength. Wished I could have convinced more whites of this.

What's hilarious is anyone who might offer insightful conversation in the NYT's comment sections has been banned.They now "pre-moderate" their entire comment section to exclude such wrong-thinks as criticism of feminism and support for the 2nd amendment.

I hope the author of that think-piece is prepared for the hate mob coming after his job.

I think one of the reasons why Generation Z will be more right wing, is because of the internet, especially sites like YouTube and Twitter. Generation Z has been exposed to the alternative media and pro-nationalism before they've even gotten out of high school.

I didn't discover people like Stefan Molyneux and Vox Day until my early twenties, and spent high school playing video games with no concern for politics, until Ron Paul came along.

"The big difference between Generation Z and its predecessors is that their knowledge of identity politics is real and formative"

Contrasting my central phoenix elementary school, being a minority as a white person, with my experience in Mesa schools, where I wasn't, forms the basis for a lot of my beliefs on race and immigration, though I'm 1995, so just barely on the edge of Generation Z, possibly not even part of it, depending your definition.

"What's hilarious is anyone who might offer insightful conversation in the NYT's comment sections has been banned.They now "pre-moderate" their entire comment section to exclude such wrong-thinks as criticism of feminism and support for the 2nd amendment.

I hope the author of that think-piece is prepared for the hate mob coming after his job."

Wow, reading through the comments on the NYT site, it's interesting that a LOT of lefties are making the same observations (with similar complaints) to what we are.Both young and old.

Of course, they all end up being like Bernie Sanders:

1. Identify problem rather accurately2. Work vigorously to implement policies which will exacerbate the problem.

"The boomer conservatives (... ) generally believe in universal systems — universal capitalism, universal democracy and the open movement of people and goods."

Shorter: "Boomer conservatives believe in universalism, which makes open borders inevitable." The sloppy way Brooks wrote it is hand-waving. I'm surprised he didn't include "motherhood," "apple pie," and "baseball."

Like NPCs or trained seals, Boomer cons respond to a secular catechism. Capitalism. Democracy. The open movement of people and goods.

@Dirk, all institutions of the Left (and anything today qualifying as an institution is by definition leftist) are being actively destroyed from within by the very people who depend on them (or own them.) The "media" (news, entertainment, or do I repeat myself?)"government."All of the various cartels (Medical, educational, advertising, etc.)Public corporations.

Each and every one is destroying its very raison d'etre, being hollowed out by insiders and/or obeying Monopoly's Iron Law by becoming a black hole for resources from which nothing of value emerges.

They all run on the fumes of inertia, and will exhibit the glide characteristics of a brick when even that declines to zero.

Excellent post. Thank You Vox. What I often see is the boomer conservatives virtue signaling not only to the left, but younger people on the right. "Come on we like LEGAL immigration" says the old, financially set white guy in his gated community to the young, struggling tech worker who lives in a vibrant community and has to delay starting a family. Worse, the boomer simply will not come to terms with the fact the reality he is insisting is only an ideological step away, is history, and no longer possible 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘪𝘤 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘴 𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘥, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘰𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳. The old boomer has zero conception of someone who grew up in a school system in which whites were not only a minority, but taught they were the reason for the world's problems. That's not even touching the feminist, religious, legal, and cultural/social changes technical progress has brought.

To me the perfect example IS immigration. Boomers just can't stop proclaiming: "Americans Love legal immigration". Besides it being mostly a conditioned response/virtue signal - Do we, do we really want more immigration, legal or illegal? And if your entire argument rests on the illegality of mass invasion, what will you fall back on when the left simply legislates anyone can come here. and we will feed their 14 kids?

That analysis is somewhat off: Look at the birth rates between 1940 and 1975. There's a small bump 1942-44, tapered off in 1945. Then a sharp rise starting in 1946, peaking in 1947, fluctuating a bit, and then holding steady from 1951 through 1957. Starting in 1958, a decline starts.... the birth rate declines until in 1965, it's the same as it was in 1945, but continues to decline, with a slight bump 1969-71 (echoing the 1942-43 bump almost perfectly superimposed on top of the declining trend, until 1975, when it finally bottoms out and starts to recover (when the leading edge baby-boomers were 30!)

Note that the interval between the two minor boomlets -- 1942-43 / 1969-71.

I think the 42-43 bump was due to a lot of women getting pregnant due to "I got my draft notice, and I might DIE!" (which indeed DID happen quite a bit). The 1969-71 bump appears to have equal area, but is spread across 3 years (probably more due to just when start/end of year happens to fall more than anything else).

1969 - 1942 = 27

But when we look at the baby boomers:

1976-1946 = 30. But the birth rate is FAR lower than this groups should have been producing. What appears to be the real dominant factor is the introduction of the first formulation of birth control pills -- first large trials in 1956, FDA approval in 1957. The decline becomes noticeable in 3 years (1960).

With the introduction of birth control pills, US birth rate vs population of females, say, 16-40, never recovers. What's surprising is that there is any sort of recovery in 1975, only 2 years after the judicial farce known as Roe vs Wade. I say farce, because the women who was used as the basis for the case, Jane Roe, came out from anonymity about 15 years ago, and vigorously protested the decision, saying that the opinion, supposedly in her favor, was NOTHING like what she was asking for -- that her attorneys hijacked her case, and twisted her argument to get something which she characterized as radical and far beyond what she was asking for.

T can see all of this stuff applying to a statistically signficant number of gen z guys.

I have seen absolutely nothing redeeming in gen z women in general, rather I see a steady progression of all the crap with them, a doubling-down on the white men having to make feminism work, along with multicultralism, etc.

Then for some reason the episode of Family Ties comes to mind where Alex, the nominally-arch conservative, goes to jail with a bunch of feminists where he declares he's a feminist, all cause he's trying to get into the pants of one of the girls.

If politics is downstream for culture, who is downstream from whom when it comes to men or women?

My stab at it is that when it comes to creation of culture, it's all about the men, but destruction has a distinctly feminine flair.

Don't waste your time. Diamond's thesis, while interesting, is not well argued. He ignores anything and everything which would contradict his thesis, and almost every criticism of the work evaluates his thesis in a manner which is more even-handed than the book does.

"Don't waste your time. Diamond's thesis, while interesting, is not well argued. He ignores anything and everything which would contradict his thesis, and almost every criticism of the work evaluates his thesis in a manner which is more even-handed than the book does."

Yes, Diamond is an egalitarian, and thinks Papua New Guineans may be smarter than Europeans...His thesis is that a lack of domesticatable animals retarded Indians from becoming civilized..It sounds interesting, but is actually nonsense because lots of animals can be domesticated if people put in the time and effort.

And all of this is why there are controlled-opposition people like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, etc to keep young people from nationalism, to keep them on the globalist plantation.

The powers that be recognized the eventual death and replacement of the boomers and had to do something to keep the youngins' fooled...

But... but... Brooks is a member of the most brilliant super-race that rose to its prominent position on pure merit thanks to their stellar average IQ - stratospherically higher than those of mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging honkies. Even Crazy Christ say so... In fact once the new officially-approved editions of the bible are available, the younger hwytes can read it themselves in the holy writ (except at the local mosque).

@48 "Boomers - 1945 - 1964Raised = : to bring to maturityThus boomers were "raised" from 1945 to 1982 when the earliest were born and the latest reached voting age."

See this graph here for U.S. birth rates.The definition of baby-boomer you used is the traditional one, defined by birth-rate statistics, and nothing more.

'Generations' is a terrific book, but I've always thought that Boomers should be called the Dr. Spock generation, because of the permissive parenting he advocated, the results of which have been obvious. And since most military weren't demobilized until mid 1945, the generation really starts in 1946 and ends in 1965 when Viet Nam got amped up by LBJ.

pyrrhus wrote:... the generation really starts in 1946 and ends in 1965 when Viet Nam got amped up by LBJ.

The US was out of Vietnam, and the draft ended, in '73. Eighteen years before that was '55. If you were born in the '40s or '50s, you grew up knowing that you were going to get drafted. If you were born in the '60s, the draft was gone before you were old enough for it to be a serious threat.

If you were born in the '60s, you came of age without the shadow of Vietnam and the draft, and you entered a workforce already clogged with Boomers, then entered a housing market that the Boomers had already bid up to the stratosphere ...

Don't you mean January 2019? If the Q coffee-grounds are correct, that is the effective date of the EO, no? He cannot wait until 2020. If Trump nods off a la Reagan until then (election year) he's likely to be toast if not already impeached and removed.

Looks like the tear gas, etc. repelled the attempt to cross yesterday but Soros' army will be coming at it again - with more women and children in front and in much greater number. They'll likely pick a crossing other than Tijuana, where the locals aren't very fond of them. Might take a few days for the buses to get there along with their Mexican Army (drug cartel?) escorts.

Yes, Diamond is an egalitarian, and thinks Papua New Guineans may be smarter than European

You heard of the noble poor. Now we have "the poor are smarter than us". This is a common idea among immigrants that think they are smarter than the indigenous stupid whites and that is why we bring them in. I heard this from an immigrant, who said my drainage idea was 60% of the solution, not good enough, after I had completed it. He was educated in civil engineering. Later it was proven I was 100% correct at half the time and materials of alternatives.

Here is a transcript of Jim Penman of the video link above from Darcy:

"Productivity isn't going up anymore even though there are great advances in computer science ... somehow we are not getting richer and that is because people are not as good at economic things and engineering and technology and innovation as they used to be. By enlarge there are some people who are still very good, particularly those who come from poorer countries, which is why we get so many immigrants from those countries."

T can see all of this stuff applying to a statistically signficant number of gen z guys."

You haven't been paying attention.

Let me present to you, Royal Oak Middle School, in Royal Oak, Michigan. Royal Oak is typically described as a city with blue collar at the south end, white collar at the north end, and wealthy professionals living on Vinsetta Blvd. which was built on either side of the (now buried and drain piped) Red Run, which winds it's way from the western border almost to the eastern border of the city, where the Red Run creek bed exists in a park, and actually carries water across the opposite street where it enters the Red Run Golf Club before exiting the city

For example, November, 2016, less than a week after Trump is elected. Location, "Royal Oak Middle School" (located in the old high school, as all 4 of the city's junior high schools were closed (and 2 of them torn down), and the students from the old high school re-assigned to the new high school, which was renamed to just "Royal Oak High School" (Formerly R.O. Dondero (the old one) and R.O. Kimball (the new one). All continuity destroyed. The two sports team names & colors, Knights/blue&gold (Kimball) and Oaks/Blue&white (Dondero) are abolished, as well as both school's colors, and replaced with Ravens/Black&Silver&RoyalBlue)

Anyway, back to the consolidated Middle School (conveniently located at the opposite end of the city from the "center of mass" of it's student population)).On Wednesday after the 2016 election, in the lunch room, a group of students start chanting "Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall!"

The cafeteria monitor, a fake American of Mexican origin, and self-proclaimed "immigration rights activist" on fakebook, starts going f*ing ballistic. The chants continue and nearly the entirety of the students in the cafeteria at that time join in, including the girls.

12-year old fake American Josie Ramon starts crying, and records the scene on her phone. The cafeteria monitor/Mexican invader "rights" activist posts the video on her fakebook page. It goes viral, and /pol is absolutely ECSTATIC!!!

Then some idiot calls the Royal Oak Police Department. The Principal spends the rest of the afternoon questioning students, trying to determine *WHO* started the chant. None of the kids trust her, and she comes up empty handed.

The cops, to their credit, tell the lunch lady that it's a free speech issue, nobody's committing any crime, they're not going to do anything, go back out to their cars and leave.

The cafeteria monitor/Mexican invader "rights" activist posts the video on her fakebook page. It goes viral, and /pol is absolutely ECSTATIC!!!

This, however, creates a problem for the PC Principal. She's now getting calls about how come her students aren't good little open-borders commies.

End result -- the next day, the Principal shuts down the school for two days. She doesn't bother to announce this until the after everyone has arrived for class. Shegets on the PA system, and orders all student and faculty into the gymnasium. She then hectors the students, and passes out a nasty-gram addressed to the students' parents. Each student is REQUIRED to return the nasty-gram with at least one parent's signature.

One day, during school hours, "It's OK to be white" leaflets start appearing all over the school.

Cops called again, and again, the do nothing. Principal is pissed. Starts going full police state -- teachers are posted at all doors, searching backpacks for contraband anti-white-bashing leaflets.

Yeah, these kids can't WAIT to get revenge.

This is the same city where the hippies shut down traffic on the 8-lane Woodward Avenue (actually a boulevard) for 3 days in the Memorial Park Riots 36 years earlier.

This is a district which also, like clockwork, elects (now retired-)Senator (((Carl Levin's))) idiot younger brother (((Sander Levin))), despite the fact that the man demonstrates no more intellectual capacity than the typical public school teacher assigned to 1st grade classrooms so someone with more competence can teach difficult subjects, like subtraction.

The saga of Generation X in tech? It began in 1990s when they were told to learn the way of the future. Java applets, ActiveX controls and COM. The world's your oyster, baby! Then the dotcom boom went up in flames completely, and when things began to come around off-shoring was all the rage. GenX'ers started getting replaced by dot Indians by the trainload. All the think tanks were for it.

But if they got replaced by dot Indians they didn't have to worry because they could code ... for free!!! It's the Cathedral and the Bazaar, baby! Funny how wages flatlined for 20 years.

Meanwhile the Boomers in tech mostly kept the executive positions. Bill Gates handed over his slot to fellow Boomer Ballmer who finally did hand a slot over to a GenX'er from ... India!!! And there was much rejoicing.

Other GenX'ers have had some success like that guy who replaced the disgraced millennial at Uber -- he's a GenX'er from ... Iran!! And their was much rejoicing.

Boomers remember when the 20-somethings were the only people who knew anything at all about computers, and this impression remains in place. GenX'ers are considered too old for tech these days (though they probably wrote most of the open source code that runs it all. For free mostly.).

It's not a happy tale for GenX'ers in tech. For the vast, vast majority of cases, they would have been better off getting into plumbing in 1995 rather than tech.

"Yes, Diamond is an egalitarian, and thinks Papua New Guineans may be smarter than Europeans...His thesis is that a lack of domesticatable animals retarded Indians from becoming civilized..It sounds interesting, but is actually nonsense because lots of animals can be domesticated if people put in the time and effort."

There were no easily domesticated animals in North America because the North American tribes HUNTED THEM ALL INTO LOCAL EXTINCTION rather than engaging in animal husbandry.

Meanwhile in extremely southern South America, the local tribes domesticated the llama and the alpaca thousands of years ago.

I don't know about the climate, but individual identities can and will change in the generational blink of an eye. And when they do change rapidly, it is usually in response to oppositional dynamics.

My ancestors lived in peace with Americans Indians for many decades, until they didn't. Proximity + diversity = war. Sooner or later. Sooner if we throw in differential population growth rates (and a colder climate, just to make things interesting).

I don’t use any drugs (unless you count alcohol). “Snowflake less”? Really showing your age there boomerfag. If you really want to get into ad hominem shit, I’m probably far less of a snowflake than you, despite my generation. I was born with a heart condition, played all season sports anyway, was the only white on my track 4x4 despite being two grades younger than them. Went to a white minority junior and high school. Worked construction over summers. Paid my own way through art school with an art scholarship I won (lower middle class problems am I right?). Started working as a pro artist for a company before I graduated and was promoted to a senior position within a year despite being beset by type one diabetes that I pay for myself, and manage without a pump through diet and exercise. No rich family or family at all really paying my way. I’ve only ever been given obstacles and burdens by you previous generations that constantly compare us with the easy, comfortable lives you were gifted by actual men. So pardon me if I erred in a made up definition, but old queens like you have nothing to offer us but hypocrisy. So on behalf of all the Millenials that escaped your brainwashing, go fuck your self with that “snowflake” crap.

K G wrote:That hardcore quarter are the people that Gen-Z learned from. They didn’t have any real contact with Boomers or Gen-Xers. The massive demographic change happened to us, during our time in public education and beyond, not any prior generations.

This hit Gen-X more than any other group. Gen-X was the first generation to live in the post segregation era. The era of busing. We also lived through the first great divorce waves as children.

All these people that fled the cities have forgotten, or never really knew why most of the large cities have experienced so much depopulation. Perhaps they believed their own BS about why they left in the first place.

The worst part about desegregation was how white kids took the blame for everything. Teachers and administrators knew it was impossible to control the black kids and so it was us who got in trouble if you got into a fight with the blacks. The politics of chip-on-shoulder began then too.

" lots of animals can be domesticated if people put in the time and effort"The Russians did the research with foxes. From wild to domesticated takes about 50 generations. You can domesticate anything you can isolate and selectively breed.

The Russians did the research with foxes. From wild to domesticated takes about 50 generations. You can domesticate anything you can isolate and selectively breed.

Diamond thinks that the fact that they did not domesticate any plants or animals is just proof that they were not domesticable. Circular reasoning at its worst. Most people don't realize just how different most domesticated plants and animals are from the original. This is special pleading that evolution just doesn't work on life-forms in places dumb people live.

My dad's two older brothers say that my dad had a MUCH easier childhood than they did. His oldest brother had no car even in college, whereas my dad had the use of a car in high school. Older uncle was born 8 years earlier.

My dad has all of the same Conservative Boomer beliefs --- whatever makes him money is capitalism. Whatever he pays for is socialism. Can't understand why I can't get work in the field of my college education (computer engineering) despite my last position in the field was Asst. Manager of the Supercomputing Group at the General Motors Tech Center. Defends the abuse of the H1-B visa (higher profits!!!!), even when he can objectively see what it has done to my life, and made relatively worthless all of the money he contributed to paying for my engineering school education (approx $25,000 in the mid 1980's).

"Difference is even our teachers weren’t white. Gen X was hit by it first, but we lived in its consequences"

My Paki grade 7 teacher accused me of cheating on a chemistry test cause she didn't understand my answers. They were correct, just done in a more effient manner that was different from what was in the corrections book.

My dad, B.Sc. (Chem) was unimpressed and angrily debated that. Course he never could put the two and two together on the culture/race issue (pre-Boomer).

Commanding General of US forces there says he no longer relies completely on his personal security detail.A senior officers PSD is typically enough men to crew 3 vehicles on patrol, plus dismounts in each vehicle so... minimum of 12 guys (for a Lieutenant Colonel, even working in shifts, that means a minimum of 4 with him, armed, with weapons in condition yellow (full magazine, magazine locked in the weapon, weapon on safe, no round in the chamber) at all times. A 4-star general probably warrants 2x to 3x as many men for his PSD.

It's odd because older white liberals secretly probably never thought they wouldn't always be in charge. In spite of their calls for "diversity". And now that they finally got what they wanted it seems they don't want it anymore. You can see it in Hollywood liberals like Bill Maher.

They want stupid brown people who they can lord over without any effective resistance, so they can implement Communist kleptocratic feudalism, with themselves as lord of the manor, and all of the other, higher aristocratic ranks.

Once again, David Brooks imagines a society where he is the golden mean and everyone else is measured in relation to himself.

The main distinction between Liberal and Conservative is egalitarianism.

Liberals insist that everyone is equal, not because it is so, but because their Liberalism would make no sense any other way.

Conservatives, except for the David Brooks variety, never accepted egalitarianism because they never knew it to be true. Some Conservatives, like Civic Nationalists, think they have approximated egalitarianism by assuming away race, and gender, and national origin, and religion. If we say that none of that matters, then we can mix people at will and call them all Americans, without having to acknowledge that pesky business about social and economic class. That is how merit is rewarded and anyone can aspire to higher rungs on the ladder if only they will apply themselves and work hard.

David Brooks is about as "conservative" as Bill Kristol, or Jeb Bush, any of the other 22 Republicans who campaigned against Donald Trump in the primary of 2016. Steeped in social and economic class, they learned their craft from the original master....William F. Buckley, the New England Liberal who cast himself as a conservative, without actually being one himself. And now we know where David Brooks pulled the nonsense about "A citizen’s job is to be activist, compassionate and egalitarian." Lifted right out of the New England Unitarian playbook, one that gave us the Temperance movement, women's vote, Nuclear Freeze movement, Earth Day, the Abolitionist movement, throughout American history. Always in rebellion in an imperfect society and never made better by any of their successes.

Regardless of the generational attitude differences which are very hard to scrutinize because of a lack of data/indexing (all generations have members all along the entire scale) does anyone think that once meritocracy becomes a minor element in society that the society will be able to continue at its current level of sophistication. Infrastructure takes competence to maintain. Just look to any large city mass transit system for examples of lack of meritocracy and inability to maintain modern standards (DC metro is great example).

Just remember that the 1965 immigration laws were passed with the promises that the ethnic make-up of the US would not be changed. Then the leftists/progressives/statists quickly took hold of the system and started changing the ethnic make-up! Now nothing can stop the changes because we haven't found the will to change the laws and stop virtually all immigration for a few decades as they did in the 1920s.

There is a religious revival going on, it's just not going on on the East Coast. It's based out of the Los Angeles basin. Anyone tagged "stupid" by the media is likely a part of it: the Kardashians, the Biebers, and so on. It's Pentecostal/Evangelical. It's going around the Pacific Rim, including Africa. It's poor people getting rich- Kardashians, Biebers. It includes Mr Bolsonaro, a Pentecostal/ Evangelical.

I'd be inclined to include Trump, except he's cradle Presbyterian- and the only person who mentioned this, ever!- is Scott Adams. His wife is Catholic. Having been raised in a Communist country, working as an international model, for her to commit to that--she's serious and private about her faith. She used her baptismal candle at her wedding.

"Now nothing can stop the changes because we haven't found the will to change the laws and stop virtually all immigration for a few decades as they did in the 1920s."

Fortunately or unfortunately, we do not need to summon the collective will to undo the major errors of the last 70 years. All in-migration will stop completely when the wheels come off the gravy train, which is unavoidable, even inevitable. Why? Because we will run out of other people's money. The Federal government is unsustainable in it's present direction and there is no one trying to slow down or turn that direction. At some point, a drunk cannot borrow or beg or steal enough for another fifth of whiskey. Until then, he will remain out of control.

I believe we may live to see the day when out-migration from the USA will be many times greater than in-migration.

Ariadne Umbrella wrote:There is a religious revival going on, it's just not going on on the East Coast. It's based out of the Los Angeles basin. Anyone tagged "stupid" by the media is likely a part of it: the Kardashians, the Biebers, and so on.

What? Kardashians and Beibers are born again Christian believers? Or are you talking about some satanic cult?

Can David Brooks be honest for one second? Boomers were adults in the era of Reagan. Gen-x and to a lesser extent millennials were raised in it.

"generally believe in universal systems -- universal capitalism, universal democracy, and the open movement of people and goods."

This was NEVER the general belief of conservatives. Not even in books of glossy covers with Bill O'Reilly staring at you in red, white, and blue. It may have been what the David Brookses of the world secretly believed, but they never convinced us of it. He's revising history to make whatever he can't explain appear foreign to the right he used to user to pretend to be on. Because his job is to explain conservatism to the left, and he can't anymore.

Ask a Rush Limbaugh listener ten years ago if the glory days of Reagan were about universal democracy, universal capitalism, and open borders. What would be their response? Probably a furrowed brow at the least. Because they're not the American Enterprise Institute. They don't even believe our country is a democracy. Capitalism in some form conservatives may consider applicable to all human society at some stage of development, but that would have to be an extremely watered-down version.

Universalism has got to be one of the few things conservatives always knew they were against. That's for Jacobins like Brooks. Christianity is really the only tendency going in that direction, because of course God's law governs all men. But it tends to be men of a certain other religion who go all global on us.

This isn't even to bring up submerged traditions of the American right. Even National Review was opposed to the civil rights movement at one point. And of course there were Sam Francis, Pat Buchanon, and everyone else Brooks would probably call Nazi. I spent my youth in mainstream conservative forums and blogs, and there existed all manner of protectionist, Lost Causer, "crunchy granola" con, whatever they called neoreactionaries back then, and so on. Types we all know if we actually lived in the American right in recent decades. None of them universalistic. Heck, Russell Kirk was decidedly anti-universalistic.

@2- I don't know how old your grandfather is, but it's a surprisingly--to me at least--short time ago that people knew almost instinctively what "identity" means. Raised under PC, I've been conditioned somewhat to ignore it. Not conditioned very well, but also definitely not as good at it as for instance my grandfather would have been.

Most books I pick to read pre-1960s have an innate sense of inheritance, place in the order of things, extended kinship. "Blood will tell," as they say. It's in there. Our forefathers knew about it. A very, very short time ago .

1960 is really late to be a Boomer, in fact per Strauss-Howe that's the start of GenX. The Boomers are defined politically by the idolization of JFK. GenX is really the group that grew up with Reagan's 'Morning in America.'

Ominous Cowherd wrote:Ariadne Umbrella wrote:There is a religious revival going on, it's just not going on on the East Coast. It's based out of the Los Angeles basin. Anyone tagged "stupid" by the media is likely a part of it: the Kardashians, the Biebers, and so on.

What? Kardashians and Beibers are born again Christian believers? Or are you talking about some satanic cult?It's been a *long* while since I've heard about either just in ambient news/comment/whatever, so given how absolutely suddenly they dropped out of the celebrity-gossip/news it might not be too far-fetched of a claim.

tublecane wrote:@2- I don't know how old your grandfather is, but it's a surprisingly--to me at least--short time ago that people knew almost instinctively what "identity" means. Raised under PC, I've been conditioned somewhat to ignore it. Not conditioned very well, but also definitely not as good at it as for instance my grandfather would have been.

Most books I pick to read pre-1960s have an innate sense of inheritance, place in the order of things, extended kinship. "Blood will tell," as they say. It's in there. Our forefathers knew about it. A very, very short time ago.It's that "big lie" being told over and over again, it's their vision for us in the future: America has no culture. The globalists are against any unifying identity: this explains why they undermine church, family, law (esp the Constitution), and anything else that people could rally behind. Oh, it's fine if one of these things exists, so long as it's essentially on par with "a hobby" and in no wise substantial.

"I am not a David Brooks apologist but from the first comment I had to point out that it is common to say that the Baby Boomers ended around 1963-1965. "

If you're talking BIRTH STATISTIC, then it's correct.

If you're talking POLITICS, it's wrong.And politically, Baby Boomerism started sometime during WW2... those who were born during the war, but whose earliest memories only go back to sometime after the war ended.

No, Christopher,no. 1964 is the cut off for Boomers; even with its ambiguities of characteristics. Kennedy was the idol of the generation previous to the Boomers: in 1960, the oldest boomers were 13 y.o. if you go by the classic start at 1947

Where were you and what were you doing when you heard the news that JFK had been assassinated? Whether you can remember that or not, assuming you were young and alive at the time, that's a good way to mark the true cultural divide between Boomers and Gen X.

@109- I am technically millennial (looked it up), and my earliest knowledge of current events goes back no farther than 1987. But I don't remember any politics from then. I only remember the Twins winning the World Series.

My first clear political memory is of the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, though I have vague memories of the Berlin Wall coming down. So I was raised in the Bush-Clinton era, really.

I wasn't consciously raised in the era of Reagan, though the first few years of my life were under his reign. And parts of that time lingered on.

That was similar to my experience in the world of work the past 25 years.

The Boomers demand undying loyalty and cam throw a tantrum if you step out of line just a hair, even if it's just their perception you messed up. They'll treat you like a traitor to the nation if they think you committed even the smallest of transgressions.

However, that impossibly high standard of performance and loyalty is never returned. They'll betray their own as a matter of principle.

"So you've been a loyal employee of mine for years? Well, I'm recommending the Black guy from another department get the promotion."

And politically, Baby Boomerism started sometime during WW2... those who were born during the war, but whose earliest memories only go back to sometime after the war ended.

FCOL, why not just declare the Boomer generation to have begun in 1898 and blame Prez Wilson and all the wars since then on boomers; for 65 years the Boomer generation has been said to have started in 1947; now, in the past two years its gone back to '46, then '45 and with this comment to '42-'43 maybe '41: Oh?!, that means the WWII 4Fers began the Boomer generation for its first five years -- that explains everything! Hell,it explains why part GenX went Goth and another part maintained Hippie styled clothing into the nineties.

People's political identity is formed sometime between 15 and 30. Reagan's presidency was such a breath of fresh air and light that a lot of Boomers turned their backs on their Ethnic/Labor/Class Democrat identity and started identifying as Conservatives. Just as Blacks started voting majority Democrat in the 1960s, Whites started voting majority GOP in the 1980s. The reasons were various, but the most common were economic or religious. That is when the Boomers who were capable of growing up formed new political identities, as Civic nationalists, mostly. It's also when the Neocons Boomers realized that the Democrats were never again going to give them the war against Russia they so desperately wanted and moved en masse to the GOP.

7. Cataline Sergius November 27, 2018 8:33 AMThe older generations of whites simply cannot conceive of the white population not being completely in charge.

Case in point.

I remember saying here a few years ago, "these minority groups aren't going to need Whites to be their political class as soon as they are a majority."

It doesn't even take a majority to win. Here in MN Phyllis Kahn (white, Jewish, liberal) was replaced by Ilhan Omar (Somali) in a US House of Rep seat. Somalis are not a majority in the district but liberal Scandanavians love to virtue signal. She won even though all evidence indicates she married and divorced her brother. Think immigration and student loan fraud, not incest.

"No, Christopher,no. 1964 is the cut off for Boomers; even with its ambiguities of characteristics. Kennedy was the idol of the generation previous to the Boomers: in 1960, the oldest boomers were 13 y.o. if you go by the classic start at 1947 "

It's NOT about birth rates. That's for the birht-rate statisticians.

For the cultural attitudes, 1947 is WAYYY too late. What keeps coming up here, time and again, is how late Silents, born during WW@, exhibit practically all of the Boomer narcissistic social-pathologies, save for not being hippies, or even being "conservative"

My dad is a perfect example. I won't go into it again, because I've discussed him in relation to this several times in the last couple of weeks, and I'm not typing it out again.

And 1964... that's probably too late of a cut-off. Probably more along the start time for what has been termed "Generation Jones" which is typically stated as starting with those born in 1960. Generation Jones are birth-demographics in the baby-boom, but on the back side, when the birth rate started suddenly and rapidly declining, for a 15-year slide. Generation Jones types are NOT hippies. They resent the fact that none of the opportunities attributed to the Baby Boom Generation apply to them, even though they are commonly grouped in with them (just like you did).

"My first clear political memory is of the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, though I have vague memories of the Berlin Wall coming down. So I was raised in the Bush-Clinton era, really. "

Which is why your birth cohort has STD rates almost as high as the 1945-1960 birth-year cohort. Also why you're almost, to a person, a bunch of sexual perverts.

The alt right will grow but will be irrelevant. Its members will be a small minority that will be deplatformed from all public discourse. If found, they will be fired, their companies driven out of business and they will increasingly end up in jail. Tolerance for opinions that threaten the elite is part of the white culture that is being destroyed and is hated by many educated young whites, especially women

Almost. For most Boomers, a political identity would start being formed in the eighth grade with Social Studies classes; the next formative grades would have been US History I (Junior year) and II (Senior year).

Don't waste your time. Diamond's thesis, while interesting, is not well argued. He ignores anything and everything which would contradict his thesis, and almost every criticism of the work evaluates his thesis in a manner which is more even-handed than the book does.

Agree. Thomas Sowell did a better job although he never much waded into the IQ debates back then. His only comments were that IQ in some groups increased so fast (one generation post WWI) that it could not be due to evolution.

He pointed out where civilizations started out, river valleys, ideally with year round flow, which usually meant mountain ranges. He noted the cheap cost of water transport which continues to this day. Ho noted seafaring skills starting in river and bays and extended out into oceans.

He differs from liberals in noting that culture and habits change due to local conditions and these changes can persist and be transfered to other groups. E.g. German precision engineering and metal work. In the end, cultures are NOT the same. He did not come up with a reason for the lack of the wheel (outside of toys) in the New World. His books on culture, immigration, and conquest on a world wide scale were quite good.

"However, that impossibly high standard of performance and loyalty is never returned. They'll betray their own as a matter of principle."

Boy, if that doesn't sound like my baby boomer, Vietnam War vet boss when I was at K-mart.

We had a project going, very high profile, and on the edge of failure (until it was found that there was a significant, but easily correctable design flaw in the vendor's code). We were babysitting the system 24x7 from headquarters (the warehouse where we installed it was in Illinois). I volunteered to take midnight shift. One of the serial connectors on the HP 9000-series servers was, for some reason, a MALE connector on the hardware. I hunted down parts, and working with the shop guys in the basement, fabbed up a DB-9 female connector that we could use to connect that port to the serial port concentrator. After we got that stabilized, another team was going to install a similar installation out in California. I told them, "Hey, you're probably going to need one of these." "Nah, don't worry about it, we'll be OK." 2 days later, "Hey, we're in a real bind here -- can you send us some of those connectors by Fed EX?"

Did a lot of other things that pulled various supervisors' nuts out of the fire (4 supervisors, 16 personnel total, constantly re-arranged as needed into task-oriented teams).

We had a vendor come in for some networking equipment based on fiber optics. I think the vendor was Infiniband. So, I was asking exactly WHAT is the bandwidth on any connection, and his answer was kind of fuzzy... so I followed up with about 3 or 4 more questions so that we finally got it converted from Marketing-speak into actual engineering specs that we could use to make a decision as to whether it was worth the (higher than ethernet!) cost per unit not.After we left the meeting, 3 different people in the group praised me for asking those questions, and asked me why I asked them, or how I knew to ask them. I explained that I was building a mental image of the capabilities, but the sales spiel implied impossible numbers ("infinity") for the bandwidth per link...so, I wanted to know what the real numbers were, and I was determined to get them.

We had a machine go down, which, because it had just passed it's 10-year anniversary date, we got a letter from HP saying that it was no longer under the service contract, so all maintenance and repairs would be time and materials. As luck would have it, a fiber-optic connected disk drive died like 10 days later. Talking to the local HP service guy, his trip would involve 90 minutes to our site, and 90 minutes back.. 180 minutes of billing just for him to drive his car... which meant, without him even coming into the machine room, we would be paying about $5000. And since he wouldn't have the replacement equipment available immediately, he would have to come out another time, meaning ANOTHER $5000 just for drive time.

So, I went to a local used computer parts vendor. This was 1998 or 99. They actually had a complete VAX 11/780. I was tempted to buy it ($2,000) just to put it in the basement, and have the only furnace in the neighborhood capable of 128-bit floating point operations. No luck on the disk drive, but they said they could order parts. I went back to Kmart, tested the unit, and had a hunch it was the power supply that sits in teh tray next to the drive. Call them up, and order it ($750). Pick it up the next day, install it. Everything works.

So, right there, I saved Kmart AT LEAST $10,000 (nobody else had even a guess)... but more likely somewhere between $12k and $15k.

Other things as well, where I saved the company significant amounts of money.

So... annual review comes... and my baby boomer boss goes and lists a bunch of inconsequential shit, and gave me what amounted to a D to D- performance rating.

I asked, "if these things bothered you so much, why did you wait until now to tell me, rather than telling me 8 months ago?"

That evaluation cost me at least $6000 in performance bonus money compared to what I expected (above average performance, but not perfect) this is when Kmart was still a profitable company. My bonus was $2000, but if the evaluation had been fair, I would have got around $8000. (A perfect performance review, which I wasn't expecting, would have been worth around $15,000).

So, after that, my morale plummeted. Ended up being invited to resign a few months later (looking back, I should have made them fire me).

Anyways, got hired in (as a contractor) to be the asst. manager for the supercomputing facility and high availability computing group at the General Motors tech center. More pay, less stressful. Unfortuntely, GM was already experiencing financial problems. Contract was cut short (due to budget reasons), just as Operating Noble Eagle was getting spun up and I got on that 3 days later... so I got lucky there.

Thre is a HUGE divide between those who remember WW2 and the great depression (especially if those are their earliest memories) and those whose first memories are the post-war years. That's why I move the beginning cut-off for baby-boomers up to about 1942, rather than 1947. The only real diff between the 1942 types and the 1947 types is the ones born in 1942 didn't go in for all that flowers-in-the-hair hippy nonsense.

"You get varying ages from different sources, but most generally agree that Baby Boomers cover 1946-1962."

Birthrate wise, it's correct.

For cultural and political assessment, it've flawed, for the reasons I have stated above.

We're not concerned about how many other babies were in the neo-natal/maternity ward with them. Our conversation here is how they behave and what their attitudes are, the impact on society, and what the defining dates for THAT consideration is.

If you're not cynical, you probably won't get our humor. The only non-GenX people who routinely get GenX humor are soldiers and marines who have served in a war zone. War makes anyone cynical... about everything, and everybody.

White liberals despair because they know that their low birthrate dooms them to irrelevance in another generation or two. Zimbabwe and Venezuela show how capable non-whites are of picking up the liberal torch. The only whites (if any) still living in 100 years will be the sort who treat women as property and non-whites as dog food.

No wonder then that liberals are so fixated on climate/ecological catastrophe, for the alternative is to imagine a world where people grow up, marry, reproduce, and die in blissful ignorance of liberal values.

From observation and personal experience, the problems you relate about bosses is common. I'm not sure it is just a Boomer trait, though. I'll have to think some more on that.

However, the problems you had are directly related to your position in the company. Your job description/title was not intended to cover that sort of performance and problem solving. Management have no clue in dealing with those who go off the reservation like that. The thinking is very regimented when they interact with employees. They get defensive when they encounter people like you. They feel threatened. They often don't understand what is driving them to act like that. It's mostly a reflex, I suspect.

Anyway, the only way around it is to become "The Pro from Dover", which requires the proper job title, or to become an outside contractor.

If you stay inside the company, you have to become an internal contractor of sorts, by changing departments to obtain the necessary title/job description. This does not guarantee you will be rewarded for problem solving or innovation, but without this, you are sure to encounter the maxim: "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished".

"Thre is a HUGE divide between those who remember WW2 and the great depression (especially if those are their earliest memories) and those whose first memories are the post-war years. That's why I move the beginning cut-off for baby-boomers up to about 1942, rather than 1947. The only real diff between the 1942 types and the 1947 types is the ones born in 1942 didn't go in for all that flowers-in-the-hair hippy nonsense."

@128 Dirk ManlyThere may be a significant difference among Catholics. The War Babies were just old enough to remember pre-Vatican II Catholicism and were more likely to have had a "WTF are you doing?!" reaction to the Vatican II changes. Boomer Catholics typically love the Vatican II changes and see nothing wrong with them.

"Dirk: Cynicism is merely realism with depression mixed with disgust."

And GenX has been forced to be disgusted realists since before each of us even attended our first day of school.

My earliest memories, 1968-69, are of watching society being torn apart, and seeing far more things falling into decay, rather than repaired, maintained, or replaced with something better. And that doesn't count the things which were deliberately destroyed for no more reason than some asshole or group of assholes get off on the destroying society's structures -- both cultural and physical.

"However, the problems you had are directly related to your position in the company. Your job description/title was not intended to cover that sort of performance and problem solving."

I was hired in as a COMPUTER SYSTEMS ENGINEER. Not only were those problems within my domain, I did all of them with full knowledge of my team leaders.

ENGINEERS find problems and solve them.Anybody can install a bunch of hardware that's all been tested by the vendor at some off-site location. I was part of a team which was taking things from various vendors, and doing whatever was needed to MAKE it work. And it was necessary, because the old warehouse management system package running on some IBM mainframe, both of which were being replaced, was costing Kmart significant sums of money due to various problems.

I wasn't some mere systems admin who is only expected to play with hardware in a "put the lego pieces together like the diagram shows" manner. This was a corporate wide roll-out, involving all 14 of Kmart's regional distribution centers.

Jared Diamond is a joke and I blame the usual suspects on the right such as Jared Taylor. Taylor spent years trying to have that glorious intellectual debate with Jared Diamond, I mean literally years.

One day bored out of my mind at the Barnes and Noble I pick up Guns and Germs sit down and flip it open the exact page that idiot Diamond wrote that some South Pacific cannibals are smarter than whites.

The book is a total joke, propped up by the intellectual clowns on the Right and their insufferable egos.

Dirk Manly wrote:Contract was cut short (due to budget reasons), just as Operating Noble Eagle was getting spun up and I got on that 3 days later... so I got lucky there.Huh. Where's you go for that one. I had some experience with Operation Noble Eagle, mostly in NM though a bit in TX.

If you're not cynical, you probably won't get our humor. The only non-GenX people who routinely get GenX humor are soldiers and marines who have served in a war zone. War makes anyone cynical... about everything, and everybody.I got hit with it triply: INTJ, GenX/Mil cusp, and military.

Dirk Manly wrote:This is why GenX humor tends to be very very similar to the humor of soldiers in a war zone.

For a good look at that, see Band of Brothers. That is the ONLY live-acting drama of any sort that I've seen which accurately captures the cynicism which is the core of nearly all wartime GI humor.I loved Band of Brothers -- and some of the GI humor is hilarious. In Iraq, we got to talking about how the real reason Middle Easterners think the US is so bad is soldiers only talk about money, sex and/or death, and so of course they would think the Great Satan was full of prostitutes... that led to the realization that the perfect comic-book for soldiers would be one featuring zombie prostitutes.

"In Iraq, we got to talking about how the real reason Middle Easterners think the US is so bad is soldiers only talk about money, sex and/or death, and so of course they would think the Great Satan was full of prostitutes... that led to the realization that the perfect comic-book for soldiers would be one featuring zombie prostitutes."

Hilarious.

When I was in Baghdad, there was a rumor circulating among the Iraqis that what allowed American troops to operate with all of our body armor was that we took special pills to keep ourselves cool.

My theory: some half-fluent in English Iraqis must have overheard one soldier tell another, "take a chill pill."

Older GenX white woman from the burbs. Far more militant than any of you posting here in my ideology, been that way for over three decades. Unfortunately, I'm in the very small minority, even in the GOP voter base of women. This is why women's suffrage was a mistake.

Zeroh Tollrants wrote:1946-1964-Boomer1965-1981-Gen X...Give or take a few yrs. The Boomer bracket above is pretty much accepted as the most agreed upon placement dates.

That bracket is just silly. It lumps the generation who faced Vietnam and the draft with the post-'55 generation who didn't.

If you were born before '55, you got a draft number, and probably an all expenses paid tour of Southeast Asia. If you were born in '60 or later, you were under 14, too young to care, when Vietnam and the draft ended in '73.

If you were born after '60, you had boomers front-running everything your whole life, sucking all the oxygen out of your air. If you were born before '55, you were one of the front-running boomers.

The Boomer/GenX divide is going to fall in the late '50s somewhere. Boomers want to call it '65? Boomers always lie.

"The older generations of whites simply cannot conceive of the white population not being completely in charge."

Yup. You have no idea. I live in a place with a very, very large population of Boomer retirees, and the cultural divide when talking to them about these issues is just staggering. Not news, I know, but I’m not sure a lot of people understand the scale of the divide. It’s like talking to people from a foreign country — which you’re literally doing, because the country the Boomers grew up in has almost no connection to the country as it exists today; it just sits on the same patch of real estate.

It’s like arguing with a senile grandparent who insists there’s still a grocery store down on the corner where there’s now a tattoo parlor. You explain that the grocery store was torn down years ago, but they insist it’s still there because it was there for their whole lives and that’s how they remember it and tearing down a grocery store to put up a tattoo parlor has to be the craziest thing they’ve ever heard of. (Gen Xers and millenials are much more aware of how much the country has changed, though as Vox notes, that’s not the same as being redpilled.)

But the vast majority of Boomers I deal with are living in a dream world where time stopped somewhere around the 1980s or early 1990s, when lily-white Boomers were at their peak in terms of cultural power and influence. Shaking them from their slumber is nigh-on-impossible. All the talk about blood and soil is just an irritating reminder of their square, stick-in-the-mud parents and grandparents.

In their minds, they’re still living in towns and suburbs where all their neighbors are white, the culture is white, the schools are white, the local government is white, and all the black and brown people live in slums in some faraway city. The only minorities they regularly interact with are all in menial service jobs — which is the way it’s been all their lives, so the fact that there are now a lot more of those “minorities” doesn’t register with them. Surely, they imagine, those huge, crushing majorities of white people that were the norm for their entire lives are still around — probably off in some big office building, wearing suits and ties and doing respectable white people work.

@147:Dirk, you missed my point. YOU may have thought that your engineer position covered your actions, but management thought otherwise. BT;DT

I worked in Product line engineering. The only workable designs came out of our group, not the R&D group. We made them look bad, so as soon as it was feasible to take a design away from one of us and put it into production, we got the pink slip. Every single time. I think all of us would have been willing to collaborate with R&D, but they refused to even talk to us. Like you, we had all been given projects, and we did too good a job.It's Office Politics.

"Dirk, you missed my point. YOU may have thought that your engineer position covered your actions, but management thought otherwise. BT;DT

I worked in Product line engineering. The only workable designs came out of our group, not the R&D group. We made them look bad, so as soon as it was feasible to take a design away from one of us and put it into production, we got the pink slip. Every single time. I think all of us would have been willing to collaborate with R&D, but they refused to even talk to us. Like you, we had all been given projects, and we did too good a job.It's Office Politics."

Kmart doesn't do R&D.

However, Engineers in the Warehouse management group were expected to do whatever was necessary to keep the computing platforms available for use.

My solution saved the company over $10,000 AND got that host up running more than 24 hours quicker than action by HP which was no longer covered by our Service Level Agreement with HP (all hosts under the service level agreement were to be returned to full capacity in 24 hours). HP's estimate was 72 hours for the non-covered host. I got it back up in 36 hours.

Simply put, there was nobody ELSE responsible for getting that host back up and running, therefore it fell on us, and I'm the one who actually made it happen...with, as I stated, the full knowledge and agreement of my team leaders.

The argument can't even be made that I made my managers look bad, because THEY were able to report that, by solving the problem, they saved the company $10,000 and got the the systems restored more quickly... and had the documentation (HP's estimated time and materials bid, and estimated time to fix vs. the receipt and actual time of repair).

This wasn't a matter of stepping on toes. This was just pure baby-boomerism at work at annual evaluation.

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